Bruce Clement

NZ and Auckland Linux User Group mailing lists down

2012-01-06T18:25:00.000+13:00

The list maintainer, Mark Foster, has reported that the virtual machine that normally runs AuckLUG & NZLUG mailing lists has suffered a misfortune. As a temporary measure he has set up a new mailing list at http://lists.nzoss.org.nz/mailman/listinfo/nzlug. If you are a subscriber to either of these lists and Mark hasn't subscribed you to the temporary list you can subscribe there. Equally if

Indian call for affirmative action on Free Software

2011-12-31T12:33:00.000+13:00

Erosion of privacy and personal freedom on online media drew worried mention at the just-concluded Fourth International FOSS (free and open source software) Conference-Kerala (FOSSK4). [...] It demanded affirmative action by Governments around the world - especially in the Global South - to promote the use of FOSS as a cost-effective, customisable and robust technology option. The Hindu,

Linux package dependencies show predator/prey relationship

2011-12-30T11:04:00.001+13:00

Computer people often talk about a "software ecosystem" on various computer platforms, but it's rare to see someone take the terminology seriously. Evolutionary biologists Miguel A. Fortuna, Juan A. Bonachela, and Simon A. Levin of Princeton University have used the tools of ecosystem analysis to look at the evolution of Debian releases, examining things like package dependencies and software

Facebook engineer talks about how they made FB mobile run everwhere

2011-12-28T19:36:00.000+13:00

Facebook has the most downloaded smartphone application ever and over 350 million users accessing their website from both smart and dumb phones. This is a talk by Dave Fetterman of Facebook on how they evolved their smart phone interface from fairly thick client to a progressively thinner one with more Html 5 features in the mix. How Facebook Mobile Was Designed to Write Once, Run Everywhere:

Zurker A New Social Network

2011-12-28T15:39:00.001+13:00

Over recent days Zurker a new social network has gone into alpha test. For the benefit of anyone who has been trapped in a windowless room for the last 7 years, social networking is a web phenomenon where individuals interact with other individuals through sharing information. Usually there is a way for businesses to spread their message as well. Today the 800 kg gorilla of social networking

13 Ways To Think About And Crush Your Competition

2011-12-28T14:23:00.000+13:00

I've been thinking about Internet start-ups a bit recently and was impressed when I stumbled across this article 13 Ways To Think About And Crush Your Competition by Jason L. Baptiste who is the co-founder and CEO of a growing venture backed startup. He's got thirteen points and they are all different, but if I had to produce a summary it would be under two headings: Be your own business -

Tis the season ... for cute rescued animal stories

2011-12-23T13:21:00.000+13:00

First-up this report from the Herald: A dog in remote north-eastern Bangladesh has become a local celebrity by breastfeeding a baby monkey back to health after it was rescued from angry villagers. The monkey sleeps with foster mum and rides around town on her back. It shows no interest in returning to the wild. Then this report: on how a cat napped in a car's engine and was found 300km later,

Virgin TV's Sunthorpe Problems

2011-12-20T12:56:00.000+13:00

In the UK a new system, which automatically checks the Virgin TV programme guide, went into over-drive over the weekend with programmes such as The History of Canals showed up as ‘The History of Ca**ls’, the Will Smith film ‘Hancock’becoming ‘Hanc**k, ‘Charles Dickens’ became ‘Charles D***ens’ even the name of London football club, ‘Arsenal’, was blocked out in a bid to remove inappropriate

Give poor children computers and walk away

2011-12-15T17:40:00.000+13:00

Interesting opinion piece in New Scientist. The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) founder Nicholas Negroponte is interviewed on his new idea ... give kids a tablet computer and leave them to it. "OLPC, even after giving out nearly 3 million laptops, is still criticised along the following lines: "Negroponte believes that you can give a child a laptop and walk away." Whether I ever believed that or

Apple's Lawsuits Made Galaxy Tab A Household Name

2011-12-15T12:50:00.000+13:00

From Tom Holwerda's blog on OS News This is, of course, a tasty and delightful serving of karma for Apple. The company clearly set out to use software and design patent lawsuits as an anti-competitive club, but instead of reducing competition, they may have actually made the competition stronger. In the end, we can only hope all these anti-competitive offensive software and design patent

Killer Snake

2011-12-14T12:46:00.000+13:00

Something out of nightmares ... 7 metre long snakes that hunt people :( Ed Jong blogs in discover magazine "Giant snakes frequently attack people in fantasy and science-fiction stories, but such attacks are not merely the stuff of fiction. Through his extensive work with the Agta, Headland has found that a quarter of all the men have been attacked by pythons. The reticulated python is the

Chrisco guilty over unfair Xmas hamper fees

2011-12-06T16:44:00.000+13:00

Tessa's a great believer in them, but I've long been a bit suspicious of hamper companies like Chrisco and this article from the Herald just helps confirm my feeling "Quite a lot were hit by huge cancellation fees - not huge by most people's standards, but something like $50 which is huge for our clients," Chrisco charges up to $150 to $200 more for its hampers than the individual items cost

Canterbury earthquake first anniversary

2011-09-04T09:24:00.000+12:00

Today is the first anniversary of the September 4 Canterbury earthquake. The one where there was property damage and we congratulated ourselves on how lucky we were that nobody was killed, largely because it was at 4 AM and nobody was on the normally busy shopping streets where there was damage, that and people whose homes were damaged were just plain lucky. Sixth months later a smaller

Indians call centre training teaches Australians are stupid

2011-07-25T20:44:00.001+12:00

In this morning's Herald was a piece on how trainee Indian call centre staff are taught that Australians are the world dumbest people who drink constantly and are touchy about animals. The trainees are told to speak slowly as according to the trainer, Australia is the dumbest continent. I'm wondering if the trainer just didn't like being called a "Brown Bastard" (Apparently the Australian name

Google ranking algorithm no longer secret

2011-07-25T18:53:00.001+12:00

Or, if you prefer, Black boxes have hairA "black box" is something that is known only by its inputs and its outputs, in principle nothing is known about what is actually inside the box. It's reasonably well known that if you allow someone to analyse a sufficiently large set of inputs and outputs of the box then they can analyse it. This is the principle behind the belief held by most

How AV Researchers Deciphered Stuxnet

2011-07-12T12:34:00.000+12:00

The fascinating story of the people who decoded the Stuxnet worm and how they did it. "Stuxnet a one-shot weapon. Once it was discovered, the attackers would never be able to use it or a similar ploy again without Iran growing immediately suspicious of malfunctioning equipment. “The attackers had to bet on the assumption that the victim had no clue about cybersecurity, and that no independent

Switching To Debian Testing

2011-05-31T23:11:00.000+12:00

We've been using Kubuntu for a few years on all our home PCs, but on Monday Kubuntu on my main desktop machine suffered a "misfortune"; I was halfway through the 11.04 upgrade when the lights went out. When they came back on, Mr PC, he no boot no more. I probably could have fixed it given enough time and inspiration, but my / partition wouldn't mount despite fsck assuring me it was fine and I've

A Link Builder's Guide To Directory Submission

2011-05-26T23:53:00.000+12:00

SEO involves a lot of tasks and one of those tasks is link building, getting other websites to make quality links to your target website. There are only a few sources of quality incoming links, and internet directories are one of those sources. What many SEO engineers don't realise is that directory owners are also actively involved in SEO, the successful ones have been around for several

Domain Admin for Drupal 7

2011-03-26T12:08:00.001+13:00

With over 100 small sites deployed using a mix of technologies, I'm always on the look-out for things that will make my life easier. I currently have 3 Jojo CMS installs, 8 phpLd directories, 6 active blogs on b2evolution and manage 2 Wordpress installs for family members. Each of these pieces of software has limitations and a lack of scalability so the other 100 odd sites I have are created with

Fossil fuels deadlier than nuclear power

2011-03-25T12:49:00.000+13:00

Interesting snippit. "Yet again, popular perceptions are wrong. When, in 1975, about 30 dams in central China failed in short succession due to severe flooding, an estimated 230,000 people died. Include the toll from this single event, and fatalities from hydropower far exceed the number of deaths from all other energy sources."New Scientist So hydro power is more dangerous than fossil fuels

New Zealand, Three Countries in One

2011-03-21T23:18:00.001+13:00

Today is the first day of Blog4NZ (Facebook) (Twitter #blog4nz). I'm all in favour of this campaign, but what can I say to you about why New Zealand is a great country to visit? I've been pondering it for a couple of days and have come to the conclusion that there isn't really a New Zealand, there's three almost completely different things covered by the concept. And there are three different

Best Interest Rate Home Loans Online

2011-03-10T22:53:00.000+13:00

In a bit of a follow-up to yesterday's piece about competitive insurance quotes, what do I find on-line but mortgage services like this one Five Star Mortgages in the US that help people find the lowest cost mortgages. They proudly proclaim "We Specialize in low rate lending across the united states. Lowest Interest rates online!" and go on to say "Our professionals specialize in helping people

On a roll

2011-03-09T22:16:00.002+13:00

I seem to be on a roll tonight. I had a good day at work documenting a part of our development process ... normally, like most developers, I can't stand doing documentation but this was developer documentation and partially involved writing some skeleton code to improve the way we develop. The evening started off badly though, after cycling home I got straight off the bike to go for a 6km walk

Competitive Quotes Car Insurance

2011-03-09T20:03:00.001+13:00

There's obviously a lot of margin in car insurance. You only need to look at how much AA Insurance and Tower have spent on their recent TV ads, or if that doesn't convince you go over to clixGalore and have a look at the affiliate scheme offers by major insurance companies, you can see the offers without having an account or logging in. One (I won't name them) are currently on the front page and

The Rat Is Back

2011-03-07T22:30:00.003+13:00

Sometime around 1995 I started using "Kiore", the Maori word for "Rat" as my nickname for on-line bridge. It became my off-line nickname as well then my ISP email address and in 2000 I registered Kiore.com to get the email address I wanted. The url of this blog comes from the same source, the original name for the blog was "Bruce/Kiore". Starting a few months before I created the Muffins blog I